FROM AN IMPOSED CITY TO A SHARED ONE: THE NEW CULTURAL DIMENSION OF URBAN SUSTAINABILITY

Abstract:

The city prevails as an essential element of our period: a territorial synthesis of progress
and, at the same time, an open field of contradictions typical of development and modernism –
a unique example of territorial and symbolic identification and at the same time a place where
changes have took place and contributed to endanger the recognition and partly its own role.
The city is the result of a double course. On one side we have the industrial course fed by
the internal economies and agglomeration ones, which is unfolded as a standardized and
consumers society, in it is becoming, together with a serious environmental impact. On the
other side we have the post-industrial course based on a services society, a less energivorous
society but at the same time, a real space-consuming one.
The latter has increased some worse effects that can be summed up in the following items:
- Cities sprawled on the territory and fed both by the communication revolution and by the
micro-electronic technology. At a minor geographic meaning of the physical distance
corresponds a more and more increasing demographic and productive mobility which aims to
enlarge the built space (suburban belts, peri-urban areas) without respecting any urbanistic law
and environmental principles;
- Sharp market segmentation which, if, on one hand, it revitalized some local territorial
systems, thanks to a more and more qualified demand, on the other hand, it creates
technological unemployment which, as a consequence, creates urban conflicts and the demand
for social reforms;
- Economic productive wave of the migratory transition which delays to organised the
urban space again according to social relationships and environmental quality;
- Division among cities and ideas, information and knowledge, “enjoyed” and shared city
by its inhabitants.

Is part of:

Proceedings of the Conference THE CULTURAL TURN IN GEOGRAPHY, 18-20th of September 2003 - Gorizia CampusPart IV: Cultural Geography and Urban Spaces